


Axes and Alphabets

by Zoya1416



Series: THE PATRICIAN'S BABY [3]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Dangerous household artifacts, Finger paint, Gen, Preschool, Toddlers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-01-09 20:38:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1150549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At 20 months, Robbie Vetinari is terrorizing his father in whole new ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Axes and Alphabets

**Author's Note:**

> All Pratchett's except Robbie. And I can't find the reference about the ho-ho.

Robbie Vetinari slipped down from his attendant's arms, and spurted between her and his golem like a watermelon seed. He'd never been so close to his goal before. The twenty month old toddler reached the big table and scrambled up onto the seat of a chair. There it was! The huge shiny thing he'd been staring at for weeks. He climbed onto the table, slipping a little because the surface was highly polished, but almost reaching the shiny thing. Then his golem Pete* grabbed the axe out of the table in the Rats Chamber, cracking it in the process, and the attendant grabbed him. He started wailing.

*It was the nursery girl who named the golem, after a gigantic but slow-witted former boyfriend.

The Oblong Office slammed open and Havelock Vetinari flew out. Even after twenty months that particular cry still reverberated in his skull, and reduced him to surging anger and fear. Today—his golem was standing over Robbie with an axe. He had nothing to counter, nothing which could stop a golem, but its chem shouldn't let it hurt the child. How was this even possible? The nursery attendant was at his elbow, offering Robbie to him. He grabbed the boy without taking his eyes away.

The golem Pete lowered the axe and replaced it on the splintered table. I Had To Remove The Axe, Your Lordship. Robbie Was Trying To Play With It, it said.

He looked at the little attendant, who was crying,  
“He jumped down. I couldn't hold him. He got in between Pete and me and ran so fast—he scrambled up the chairs like a monkey.”

This was not the first time Robbie had evaded his caretakers. Last week he'd yanked his hands away and dashed off in the Palace Garden while he was being taken to see his antelope, Fluffy, and came within a foot of the ho-ho.**

**Like a ha-ha but fifty feet deep (Pratchett)

Vetinari had an arrangement with the Librarian to obtain baby care books for him. That way he wouldn't have to be seen buying or ordering them. He had seven now. None of them had told him what to do with an escape artist. It was a complete mystery to him. He had not been like this as a child, although he did like to hide. That had been beaten out of him by his father, before his parents died and he came to live with Roberta.  
He came up with an idea out of thin air (not knowing that this was the way parents had to live a lot of the time.)

He set the little boy down, noticing again how the large-boned and blonde child resembled his mother, who had renounced the child at birth. The eyebrows and shape and color of the eyes were his. As was, he was beginning to realize, the essential sneakiness. This one could hide behind a beautiful appearance, unlike the scrawny dark thing he'd been as a child. 

Drawing in a breath, he scolded in the short sentences Sybil Ramkin had assured him were the best for this age.

“Robbie, you ran away. That's bad. You could have been hurt. It was mean to Molly and Pete, because they were keeping you safe. Don't do it. I have to punish you now.”

At this juncture he paused. Most of the baby books said not to spank a child. But the alternative suggestions hadn't been helpful, and his hand itched. 

“I am not going to read “Where's My Cow?” tonight. And you say sorry to Molly and Pete.”

Unfolding his knees with a slight creak (there was a reason humans normally reproduced in their twenties, he thought), he thought out loud:

“It's either tie him up or lock him in his room until he's twenty, and I don't know which.”

His aunt had said that, he belatedly realized. Becoming a parent seemed to activate every old parental phrase he'd sworn never to utter.

He went back to the office, glaring at his visitors, daring the Cattlemen's and Renderer's Guilds representatives to say anything. Most of them, he knew, kept their children upstairs in a nursery, and never brought them down except for evening hugs and kisses.  
He, who was the flint-hearted, black-clad downright terrifying Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, who could make grown men shudder with a look, wasn't that kind of person, he'd found.

 

Before Robbie he would have said that keeping children where they were not seen or heard was the best way to raise them. The child's mother wasn't around, so if he didn't make time, he might not see the boy for days.

He had the same problem, he reflected sourly, as any other parent who lived above the shop.

 

Sybil Ramkin was his only confidante. A number of Ankh-Morpork's highest society spinsters would have loved to take on the baby, if it meant being the Patrician's wife, but he never considered them. They only wanted status, and he was very doubtful they'd treat the child well. But Sybil was his friend, and was safely married to Sam Vimes, and a happy mother to Young Sam.

“What can I do, Sybil? What did you do with Sammie?” (Everyone except his father was calling him Sammie now.)

“He was mostly in the nursery,” she said. “With the dragons I couldn't do otherwise. Why was Robbie out?”

“Because he went to play with the damned antelope. I'd get rid of it tomorrow, but he likes it. And the baby books say children need sunshine.” He dared her to be amused about reading baby books.

“Sammie's two and a half, and he's a bit bored. The nursemaid takes him up and down in a pram, and he likes that. He doesn't try to get out.” She smiled to herself. Sam and she had been very lucky that their boy had an easy-going personality. “ I know,” she continued, “why don't we start a little day school for them? A little place in the Palace where children can play with toys, with clay, learn their colors and how to get along. I can think of two little girls who'd like to come. Brenda Rodley's great-nieces lost their mother not long ago, and she's stumped about them.”

Their initial class had six babies, including Duchess Brenda Rodley's great nieces, 15 month old twins Lizzy and Zizzy.***

*** Nobody was calling them Elizabeth and Zosima except the Duchess. It seemed to be the thing with babies, the Patrician thought, that the parents thought hard about baby names but never considered probable nicknames. Certainly his parents hadn't thought about calling him “Havie.”

The other two were one-and-a half and 3 years old, Bindo and Ramon, both boys, children of Lord and Lady Decatur, who traveled constantly for their import-export shop. Their newest success were the matruska dolls with the last inner compartment the right size for a little nip, and the sorries****of the Agatean empire.

****You had to say “sorry” for staring at the girl wearing them. They had a transparent veil and trousers. One is fashion, seven is a dance.

Sybil had the play center started in two weeks. The complaints started coming in at three. The four oldest children were learning a pecking order, and alliances were constantly re-forming. Lizzy and Zizzy were biting everyone.

Sam didn't think it was quite fair that all the complaints about the school came to Sybil, but the school had been her idea. And no one wanted to cross the man with a scorpion pit. Vetinari had to curb his desire to hang up all the parents whenever anyone hit Robbie, but indeed he seemed to be mostly a perpetrator. 

She added an attendant who had taught in large nurseries, and the two woman got things under control. In a year and a half, the constantly changing inmates left Robbie and Sammie the undisputed leaders. They were now three and four, and their combined powers left no room at the top. Robbie was the same size as Sammie, and tried to keep up with Sammie's development. 

The duo had once captured the poo of most of the now eight animals in Robbie's menagerie (three at two years and four at three), flinging it at the other children and each other like monkeys. The animals at year two included a Bichon Frise puppy, which the Patrician always enunciated clearly, a chinchilla, and some discus fish.*****

*****The fourth would have been an echidna, which he removed from the collection. Unsurprisingly, the third year pets were a frilled lizard (removed due to claws,) a gerbil, a hamster, an iguana, and a jawfish. He could see where this was going.

Today some chaos erupted at the front of the class, involving biting, and hair pulling amongst the city's future leaders.

Robbie and Sammie were alone for a second. Robbie saw that the fingerpaint box hadn't been completely closed. He and Sammie each grabbed for the same one.

“Is my paint!” yelled Robbie.  
“Mine!” said Sammie.”Give it to me!”  
The fight would have continued except that the little pot's lid came open, and they each got a handful of red glop.

“I'll get you,” said Sammie, and put paint into Robbie's hair.  
Robbie didn't say anything but he smeared paint on Sammie's shirt. Then he saw the white walls of the classroom, and wanted to color it. He got one good handprint in before Sammie grabbed him.

“Give it back, you little—bastard!” Sammie had heard his dad say that, and when Mommy had shushed him, he knew it must be a good word to remember.  
Robbie had heard the same word, but about him, when visitors didn't know he was listening. It meant something mean, and he got madder. And pushed harder.

But he slipped on the red goo, and Sammie fell on top of him, getting one last handful of paint on Robbie's face, and then the teacher-girls were screaming at him, pulling Sammie off him, and getting paint all over themselves. Finally the head teacher grabbed two sheets from the dress-up box, which were meant to be Klatchian, and wrapped them up completely.

Sybil was out of town for a half day, inspecting the Viuables' new dragon hatchlings in their manor on the way to Quirm. So it was the Patrician and Sam who were frowning at the teachers and each other. The senior teacher had been headmistress at a day school on the Ankh side of the river, and, unimpressed by the Patrician and the Duke, frowned right back.

“It was mischief, not meanness, your Lordship, your Grace. They will help clean up and they will not get to use the paints for a week. The language is something you will have to deal with yourselves. I normally use soap in the mouth, a tried and true measure, but you have to catch them immediately. They're actually good friends. Fighting and getting into trouble is what little boys do.”

Robbie's Daddy made him help Sammie clean up, but also talked to him about being a good example to others, because his father was the Patrician, (whatever that meant, but mostly it meant he stayed in his office and talked to people all the time). His Daddy made him write, “I am sorry” ten times. Robbie didn't know all the letters, but his Daddy showed him. It was fun to be near his Dad. 

Robbie liked learning all the letters, and to his father's surprise, in a few weeks he started sounding them out, then trying to read.

He showed his new skill to Sammie, writing out his animals' names.

“Thee, my antawope—it's an A. And the bizhonn is a B.”

Tallulah was a smart woman, thought the Patrician, seeing them reading. Those dratted animals actually help. He sighed, wondering about next year's lot. He was going to have to start a public zoo, and let Robbie keep only a few at the Palace. A good place might be Hide Park, so more people could see them, but it was fairly small. The Tump was probably better...put it on the far side, so neighbors wouldn't complain about the smell...which ones could he move there without distressing Robbie very much...It might seem silly for a grown man to be afraid of making a child sad, but that was the way he felt. He had emotions now which he would have sworn did not exist in him. He'd had to keep a deep frown on, looking at the fingerpaint mayhem, so that he wouldn't snicker. He wondered whether the terror part would ever leave completely.

It was a long way from reading music quietly by himself in the evenings, he thought wryly. A great deal of upheaval for a man who'd thought he had his life stable and secure. And just when the nursery duties had slacked, the child was out of nappies and was talking well, discounting a few pronunciations the books said were normal... now this. If Robbie and Sammie were so mischievous at this age, what would they be like at six? Or thirteen...? right at this moment, though, he wouldn't change a single thing. And he certainly wasn't going to tell anyone about once liberating Aunt Bobbi's lipsticks for an afternoon's doodling on walls...and making the acquaintance of her birches.


End file.
